5.5 How to Treat What is Kept Outside

In a given project, one will always choose not to place some objects under configuration management sometimes a few; other times, many more. These objects are not necessarily less important, and they must be taken seriously. Handling these objects is not, however, the responsibility of the configuration manager but usually of the project manager, development manager, or, in some cases, the person who produced the object. These objects must of course also be identified and stored securely. They may well be related to configuration items.

Objects to Keep Outside

Objects not normally placed under configuration management may include

• Those that have no significance for the delivery of the complete product (e.g., letters and other administrative material)

• Those that don't change once they have been produced (e.g., minutes of meetings and status reports )

• Those that may otherwise be reproduced (e.g., compiled versions of source code or executable files)

In the third case, it must be considered whether it's more expedient to place the tools used to produce the objects or derived objects themselves under configuration managementthat is, whether to place, for example, the source code and compiler or the source code and the compiled module under configuration management.

Identification

It can be an advantage to define conventions for unique identification even for objects not placed under configuration management. To give an example, documents, such as status reports, may be covered by a naming convention for documents in general, whether a document is placed under configuration management or not.

It may also be an advantage to note comprehensive information about tools, to make it possible to reference these from the configuration items, even if the tools themselves are not under configuration management. In this case you can always hope it will be possible to get hold of a specific tool if you need it later.

Storage

Even objects not under configuration management will have to be kept somewhere. That is to say, you need a library that is not the controlled configuration management library but that is still under some form of control. This may be solved in various ways, but the best solution is a controlled (that is, defined and controlled) library, independent of the configuration management library. Objects not under configuration management should never be stored in a way that might raise doubt about whether they are under configuration management or not (that is, other than in the configuration management library).